


Venite Adoremus

by komodobits



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Oneshot, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stigmata (Freeform), Written to honour Askance and Casey's Mashiach series, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-12
Updated: 2015-12-12
Packaged: 2018-05-06 08:46:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5410451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/komodobits/pseuds/komodobits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone went to their own town to register, so Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.”</p><p>Sam’s palms are itchy under the band-aids.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Venite Adoremus

**Author's Note:**

> This is a crosspost from tumblr that I wrote last Christmas, so if you have seen it before, then that is why!
> 
> This is dedicated to Askance and Casey, whose Mashiach series changed everything about the way I feel about Sam, the premise of which I am tentatively and carefully borrowing, out of love, and I am so so honoured that they even allowed me to play in their sandpit at all. Merry Christmas!

“In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.And everyone went to their own town to register, so Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.”

Sam’s palms are itchy under the band-aids.

Band-aids because they’ve run out gauze. Those real bandages, hospital-standard, pulled from first-aid kits and from paramedic packs when ambulances arrive late to the scene of a crime as though the monsters can be saved – they bleed through easy. Dean used to untie all the length of it, wring it out, wrap it back around and around, and let it press back close to his skin with another, clean expanse of gauze to the wounds now, so that the dirtied sections could dry, but the time came when there was no clean expanse of gauze. The bandage was all dyed a bleak, muddy red, and at that stage, it doesn’t hold back anything. The blood swells through like brown ink on blotting paper and smears across all he touches like he’s marking the door-jambs of the first-born sons of Israel. It’s not so effective when he’s painting the Impala windows red. They use band-aids now. Hold back the flow a little longer.

Here, in this claustrophobic, backwater church up in the Ozarks, Sam is away from the news reports of miraculous events and shaky home-videos of Dean hurrying Sam away from some scene of chaos and religious fervour – the sweet, rich darkness of wine spreading uncontrolled from the locus of Sam in a lifeboat as he checked the scene of a mysterious Lake Erie drowning; the doves that defy normal migratory patterns and seem to follow him wherever he turns, mounted on every car and signpost since  Dallas; the gale force winds sweeping up from Louisiana that uprooted trees and pulled down electricity cables only to fall into quietude just short of the Enright Motel in Clarksdale, Mississippi where Dean was washing Sam’s feet for the third time that day.

Here, no-one knows who Sam is, and a middle-aged man in a home-knit scarf is doing the Christmas Gospel reading. He is telling the story of Jesus’ birth.

Dean fidgets beside Sam. He shuffles his feet under the kneelers and taps out a bored staccato on the floorboards. Sam doesn’t have to look at Dean to know that he thinks all this is a crock of bullshit. Show him demons and he’ll call it his birthday come early; show him angels and he’ll scoff his way to cutting their strings; the Messiah, it seems, is a whole other story.

Dean doesn’t like the idea that the entire world should rest on one guy’s shoulders – he thinks it’s unrealistic and unfair and totally shitty, by the end of it all, and he’d rather pretend the whole thing never happened than admit that someone went through so much, for what Dean sees as so little.  _If you had to pick anyone to be sacrificed for the good of humanity,_ Dean always rants,  _who in their right mind would choose their own freaking kid? You just wouldn’t let him go like that._ This is usually the point at which Sam tunes out, because there are some things Dean understands and there are some things that he doesn’t.

“She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.“The reader lifts his eyes from the Bible, lets his gaze sweep over the crowd before him – and for a moment, his eyes fall on Sam.

Fearing recognition, Sam lifts a hand to anxiously flatten the fabric of his hat – bad etiquette for church, he thinks with a flash of guilt – but he hasn’t bled through the wool. He tugs it a little further down his forehead, self-conscious.  He feels a bubble of blood squeeze past the edge of one of his band-aids, and he tugs his sleeves down over his hands.

The reader falters for a moment, but looks away to the rest of the congregation. “And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night,” he says. “An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.  But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid’. ”

 _Do not be afraid._ Sam mouths the words silently. No angels ever told him that. All he ever got from the angels was filth and filth and dirty soul, the shadows’ fingernails dug deep into his core ‘til his every heartbeat was all Azazel and he went to bed with his mouth full of salt so the devil couldn’t creep in while he was sleeping. And there was Cas, of course, but Cas doesn’t count – he’s one of the good guys.

Cas was the one to tell them the long and short of it. In Calvary, Wisconsin, he flickered into the room with a copy of the King James clasped tightly in two hands, while Sam sat with his back against the motel radiator trying not to bleed onto the carpet. At that time, his forehead had only recently begun to split into raw, peeling wounds, and the first trickle of blood had traced its careful path down his face. There was blood in his eyelashes when he looked up at Cas, and so the memory is crimson-tinged. Sam doesn’t remember what Cas said, precisely. He remembers that his hands were sticky, and he dripped red onto the floor, and Cas had his eyes closed while he talked, as though he couldn’t bear to look at him. Sam thinks he might have asked,  _what do I do?_  but if he got an answer, he doesn’t remember it.

Dean nudges him. “Stop it,” he whispers.

Sam looks over, bewildered, and it is only when Dean glances down that Sam realises he has been distractedly rubbing the back of his hand with a thumb, over and over, pressing hard enough to bruise.

“Sorry.” Sam lowers his eyes.

The priest steps back up the pulpit, clears his throat to address the congregation.

Sam lets his hands fall loose into his lap, although the addictive need to touch does not go away. On the contrary, it seems to build and build until he is scarcely conscious of anything else in the world but the dull ache in his palms and in the arches of his feet and spotted unevenly over his eyebrows. It sounds masochistic, and he’d never tell Dean, but Sam likes the pain of it – likes pressing his fingers against the hollows and the raw open redness of it until it stings so sharp his eyes water, because the pain is an assurance that it’s real, and it’s happening to him, of all people. He has been chosen.

“Glory to you, Lord Jesus Christ,” Sam says; the room around him picks up with quietly reverent voices in response to the priest.

He wants to pick at his skin, pluck and scratch until it all comes away. The band-aid is a bubble now, convex to his skin as the blood fills the space behind the rubber and gauze. It begs to be popped.

The church fills with the scuff and shuffle of church-goers getting to their feet as the next hymn is announced, and the opening bars of O Come All Ye Faithfulpick up from the grand old piano left of the altar. Immediately, Dean starts to complain and looks around for the exit as he remains firmly seated; Sam ignores him, reaches for the hymn book on the pew beside him, and stands.

His knees buckle. In an instant Dean is up beside him with a hand flattened at the small of his back to steady him, but Sam has already thrown a hand out to lean on the pew in front, and he is stable. He will not sit down. He wants to do this properly. Shrugging Dean’s support away, Sam straightens and takes his hand from the next pew, and that is when he sees that he has left a dark smear of blood over the wood. The bubble is burst.

Sam tugs his sleeve down and hastens to wipe away the stain, but he can feel the eyes of his neighbours on him. He ignores them. Page 103 – O Come All Ye Faithful. He sings, and is not fazed by Dean’s extra-loud, extra tuneless singing for the sake of being obnoxious, and he holds his arms carefully, elbows akimbo, so that his sleeves hide his hands, where he is slowly bleeding onto the pages of his hymn book.

The time comes to turn the page. He does so, and leaves a crinkled red print of his own hand, life-lines and all.

In the row behind, he can hear someone begin to whisper.

“Sam,” Dean says, voice low.

“I’m fine,” Sam mutters. He swallows thickly around a lump in his throat, stares down at the page until the words swim. God of God, light of light. There is a dark flutter of shame inside his chest at being observed and talked about, being treated yet again like he’s something different, but he reminds himself that every drop he bleeds is for mankind, and every moment that his legs tremble beneath him and his feet hurt so that they curl inside his shoes and he can hardly walk is so that others may live in peace – and it’s thoughts like that which make him want to press his bloody handprints everywhere. Leave a lasting mark of his purity and his blessedness. He wants to touch Dean’s skin with these hands.

A bright blot of blood falls from his face to splatter neatly over the second verse. He has bled through his bandages.

He wipes the droplet away with his finger and it scars the yellowed paper. Before he has time to draw his hand away, another drop falls, upon his knuckle.

“Momma,” the voice of a  young boy says plaintively, loudly. “What’s wrong with that m—”

“Quiet, darlin’ – you mind your own business. We’re on verse three.”

There is the creak of floorboards as people on the other side of the church turn to look at him. Sam tries to fill his head with the sound of the music, the tinkling piano and the cacophony of voices, the vibrating baritone of the priest, but steadily he grows ever more aware of talking, like a mosquito droning in his ear. He hears his own name. Again. And again.

He breathes in through his nose and focuses on the words in front of him – o come, let us adore him, o come – but as drop after drop falls on the hymn book, the verses become illegible. The blood from his hands seeps into the pages until the book is wet and heavy. The paper feels laden with flowers. His burden is heavy.

“Sam,” Dean hisses, urgently. “Sammy.”

Sam feels blinded, his eyelashes wet with blood, his hands covered. He realises, absent-mindedly, that he is shaking.

“Sam!” Dean grabs a handful of Sam’s shirt, and on weak legs Sam crumples, falling heavily against Dean’s shoulder.  He hears Dean’s voice, muffled and distant. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

At last Sam raises his eyes, and he sees the church almost entirely fallen to silence, eyes on him. There is a child with tears on her eyes. An elderly man raises his hands to perform the Sign of the Cross. There are gaping open mouths, and there is recognition. In the background, the piano twinkles loudly on.

The hymn book slips from Sam’s fingers and lands with a wet slap on the floorboards.

Without hesitation, the woman beside Sam lunges to snatch it up, presses it close to her chest with wide-eyed amazement, and Sam only has a moment in which to meet her eyes before Dean wraps an arm around his waist and guides him out of the pew and towards the exit. Sam’s every footstep squeaks wetly, blood all inside his shoes now where it’s soaked through two layers of winter socks. Heads turn to follow him.

There is a bent old woman at the end of a pew whose face is soft with wonder as he passes. “Sam Winchester,” she rasps, and stretches out frail, age-crinkled fingers to reach for him.

“Don’t touch him,” Dean snaps, loud enough that the piano stops at last, and the hymn is cut off entirely as all twist where they stand to watch him walk. Dean jerks Sam by the shoulder, away from the woman’s touch, to usher him out the door.

Outside, the daylight is startling, the light harsh and thin as it glances off the snow. It’s not far to the Impala now, where Sam can rest and be still and be washed of his wounds, but as they make their way through the thin, cold slush, a single dove shushes down towards the earth, its wings a whisper as it spreads them to slow and land on the tarmac. It cocks its head at them, and lets out a soft, inquisitive chirrup.

Dean kicks it away with the toe of his boot. 


End file.
